#RAGE ITALIC FONT SMOOTH MAC OS X#

Is all the people saying that the apple approach, or even worse the freetype approach, is вЂbetter formedвЂ™ and вЂcloser to printвЂ™вЂ¦ During general usage it doesnвЂ™t really matter to me which of the two extremes IвЂ™m using, but when I need to get actual work done вЂ“ which involves lots of reading, whether IвЂ™m doing OSNews or university work вЂ“ I find on-screen readability a much more important asset than print accuracy. The big question for you, our dear, loving, and always understanding readers: which do you prefer? Shape accuracy, readability, donвЂ™t care? Or, do you prefer no font smoothing at all? Screenshots are welcome, of course, but please note that you really shouldnвЂ™t skip in image quality, because that will only ruin the font accuracy in the screenshots.

Font rendering on X used to be a bit of a laughing stock, but over the past few years most Linux distributions have achieved very good defaults, and with the customisability, itвЂ™s got something for everyone. In the X world, FreeType is the most common rendering engine, and since this is X weвЂ™re talking about, it allows for a lot of flexibility, so you can tweak your fonts towards readability, towards shape accuracy, or anywhere in between.

#RAGE ITALIC FONT SMOOTH MAC OS X#

This is also why Windows users tend to see Mac OS X fonts as вЂњfuzzyвЂќ. This is not odd, seeing how the Mac has a very large presence in the desktop publishing and content creation fields. Mac OS XвЂ™s Quartz, on the other hand, prefers shape accuracy over readability, leading to the situation where fonts on the screen are very close in shapes to how they appear in print. ClearType favours on-screen readability, meaning that some text may be forced into integral coordinate positions, which increases readability, but does lead to the fact that text may look different when printed out. In any case, Mac OS X and Windows are polar opposites in the font rendering world.

This means that when rendering text over a textured background, the anti-aliasing is accurate on every pixel.вЂќ

This means that instead of anti aliasing against a specified font background colour, it takes the font foreground as being opaque, and the background colour as transparent. вЂњA new feature which has been introduced in recent versions of the font manager is вЂbackground blendingвЂ™. One of the coolest things вЂ“ which IвЂ™m not sure other operating systems have вЂ“ is that RISC OS has a feature that will even render fonts properly on textured backgrounds, no matter the background pixel colour. IвЂ™m now waiting for a correction on this one. Since weвЂ™re inevitably going to end up with at least one thread about who did it first, I figured IвЂ™d get it out of the way from the start: when it comes to operating systems, it wasnвЂ™t Windows, it wasnвЂ™t Mac OS, and it wasnвЂ™t Linux вЂ“ too bad, folks, it was RISC OS that had the first system-wide, intricate, and still unsurpassed вЂ“ according to some вЂ“ font rendering in operating systems ( screenshot). While I wonвЂ™t go too deeply into that post, I did figure it was a good opportunity to talk about font antialiasing in general which type do you prefer?ДЇont anti-aliasing actually consists of a whole set of different technologies that increase either readability or shape accuracy вЂ“ or a compromise of the two. The Engineering 7 weblog has an item about the improvements made in the ClearType font rendering technology which has been included in Windows since Windows XP.

Rage italic font smooth